What we can forget
Purpose and the hero's journey
There was a point to her sacrifice. Countless long nights of problem solving led to the new design. It was programmed perfectly and would work well at scale. The high and exasperation she felt simultaneously crescendoed. The feature was crafted with care and solved the customer problem. Its release and launch marked a milestone—internal validation for what she and her team had given up and also the beginning of her journey’s end.
She’d always been drawn to this market and problem space. The founder’s story— the hero’s journey and in this case social cause—spoke deeply to what she believed in and inspired the impact she personally could have. In her personal narrative, this person she’d first emulate and one day become.
Instead of escaping reality the story helped her navigate it.
It’s why she joined the newly IPO’d company just ten months ago.
Everything is here for a purpose, from horses to vine shoots. What’s surprising about that? Even the sun will tell you, “I have a purpose,” and the other gods as well. - VIII.19
But things started to change— slowly first and then abruptly. Newer entrants in the same Clean Tech category began swallowing market share and pressured the company’s meteoric success. The trajectory of the company’s past few quarters eroded. The company’s stock price suffered after weak forward guidance was provided to the street.
She learned a few weeks later that the feature she and her team built would be shuttered. Despite its initial traction, the company needed to pare substantially as it had hired and funded aggressively. Surprisingly this wasn’t— by itself —a huge concern. She knew a recently IPO’d Tech “scale up” with a short operating history would have its share of growing pains. She’d find a different role on another team in the engineering organization.
Later a company mission and purpose statement change accompanied other shifts. It was driven by logic, rationality and constraint. But it struck a flat note on both paper and her heartstrings.
Each passing day on her new team felt like participation in a hapless sequence of events. She loved her new teammates but no longer understood how her — or their — contributions fit in. It wasn’t that the strategy was objectively unsound: rather the lack of connection to the purpose of the company she once knew.
The story she was once enraptured in on her path to becoming the heroine of her own narrative began to unwind.
It wouldn’t take long to decide to leave as her own performance waned. When she did, it was only a few months post her one year anniversary.
She kept up with her past colleagues some months after her departure. Many had also decided to leave. The magnetic pull of the company’s purpose and mission now muted. Others could no longer see themselves achieving the type of personal transformation intrinsic to their own success despite the company’s compensation plan. Once missionaries now struggled as mercenaries.
In this case, the company’s ensuing fortunes were predictable. It wasn’t the only reason but without people powering purpose, overall firm performance declined. Off in the distance the vultures began to circle.
Unpacking Purpose
The parable above has a two part purpose:
To frame it’s modern importance in business
Serve as a springboard to unpack an overloaded term
Like Strategy, “purpose” in Tech is often conflated and leads to confusion.
Purpose today has three meanings1:
Competence — The function that your product serves
Culture — The intent for how your business is to be run
Cause — The aspiration to create social good
Cause-based purposes garner an outsized proportion of interest. Think the “double bottom line” businesses of the world.
Ben & Jerry’s — the company behind “Netflix and Chilled” in your freezer — works to advance human rights and dignity, support social and economic justice for marginalized communities, and protect and restore the Earth's natural systems.
Tom’s Shoes that you “wear good” is in the business to improve lives and gives 1/3 of it’s profits away for good.
The reality is that few businesses in our sphere can or should have a truly cause-based purpose. In Tech they tend to be in Clean Energy, Healthcare, Education (K-12 & Corporate), Sustainable product companies and certain IT businesses.
The “tech enabled” WeCompany was famously lambasted for it’s inane vision statement — to elevate the world’s consciousness. A great example of a confused cause-based purpose. You and I know, by now, that well appointed, tech enabled offices in posh locations can be a great product (“competence”) as long as the company is run well2.
The connection is simple: purpose is an anchor of Strategy. Remember the “value stick” as briefly explored in a prior Meditation, it’s an important lever to decrease an employee’s “willingness to sell” below their labor rate. This creates surplus and as a byproduct value.
Netflix is in the business to “entertain the world”. What it lacks in cause-based purpose it makes up in culture.
Their original culture deck is the G.O.A.T. Clearly articulating the 7 aspects3 of their culture — how then they intended to run the company — led to universal interest and recruitment. A high performance team based of people powering purpose. Culture not cause and clearly articulated and universally understood.
Closing thoughts
You and I are the hero of our personal and professional narrative. Purpose drives us. While some argue that in our early careers we don’t need it4 — like the “horses and vine shoots” we’re inevitably drawn back by it’s magnetic pull.
A firm grasp and assured understanding of it’s linkage to how we create value as leaders for the businesses we operate is central to not blundering. Especially amidst change.
Because for the rest of us, it’s hard to forget.
A revelatory HBR article on the Purpose of Purpose for a deep dive
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2023/09/25/long-term-contracts-can-go-bad-wework-example/
The 7: Values are what we Value, High Performance, Freedom & Responsibility, Context, not control, Highly aligned, Loosely coupled, Pay top of the Market & Promotions and Development.
Sensational title aside, Stephen Friedman lays out the case